January was just beginning when the roof fell. The landlord said it was the fault of the engineer who had used poor materials to build the house. Mr Dafe did not care, he held the landlord responsible for the death of his cat and took the matter to court. The cat in question had been pursuing a certain rat when the roof fell. This rat had been a bane to its existence ever since the rat discovered the location of foodstuffs in the house. Every time Mrs Dafe entered the kitchen and saw another half eaten plantain on the floor, it was the cat that took the blame.
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The rat in its own defence had just given birth to six squalling tiny replicas of her self. They needed food. A mother does not sit at home and watch her children starve. She knew that going into Mr Dave's house was dangerous but desperate times called her to take desperate measures. When the roof fell she was half way across the lawn, the entrails of a gutted fish in her mouth. While the dust settled and the cat's spine snapped, she braced herself to cross the thick plantain forest at the edge of the compound where big bush rats who were as ferocious as cats, lived. These rats did not care for anyone.

While Mr Dafe mourned his cat, the rat fought with rats twice her size in order to provide food. Those rats did not come to play. They tore through her like she was made of paper and starch. As she laid breathing her last, she wondered what would become of her children. The bush rats squabbled over the fish entrails and in the process the eyes of the fish fell on the soft humus.

If those eyes could speak, they would have told you of the strange things that they have seen. The fish that owned them had lived in the sea and it had been beautiful for it until a trawler came and packed it and its relatives in a net and that was the end. It had seen the magnificence of the sun setting over the waters. It had seen coral reefs turned rainbows in the late afternoon light and it  remembered the darkness that hid at the depths of the sea.

The sea, the sea knows nothing except the moon and the shore but the moon did not tell it what it had seen that evening. The moon sees a lot of things but says nothing. If the moon can be silent on huge matters then on something as minute as a collapsed building or a fish in a net or a rat dying in a plantain forest, it definitely had nothing to say.

But is the matter a collapsed building minute? You know even if the moon is silent, people talk. Yes, human beings will say anything whether true or not as long as it engages other people's attention. So thus Mrs Ekene whispered some sort of truth. It was garnished with uncertainties, speculations and blatant lies. Yes, she said that she heard that some persons from down the street whose name she didn't know were heard to  have said that they saw the landlord doing incantations around the building, the night before the roof collapsed.

It is fake news like this that get people into trouble. Fake news like the one that said that the minister was sharing bags of rice at the convention holding on the football field which made those women leave their stalls at the market, rush to the football field only to  find a primary school interschool meet going on there and returning back to the market learnt that there had been a fight. Madam palm oil's daughter of eight who she had left in the care of her pregnant neighbour at the market had been hit by a flying bottle and was now at the hospital.

You should see the hospital through the eyes of weary and troubled mother. It was crowded and stank of disinfectant. There was enough pain in there to make her skin itch and her bones boil. She kept asking every nurse for directions to the children's ward but each nurse had something on their mind and that distracted look of someone under pressure.

Nurse Osas was not distracted by the noise in the hospital. She was still thinking of last night. She had spent time with Bobby again. The man loved sex more than food and he was good at it too. They had turned the bed into a pool and by the time it was dawn, she could barely move her legs. She had to come to work though. She just could not forget. She smiled as she moved through the crowd and patients considered her to be the nicest nurse ever.

Landlord could not forget either. He had stood by the entrance to Nurse Osas' rooms with a paper bag of barbecued fish, a bottle of wine and a itch underneath his zipper. He had watched her and the man she told him was her brother, the man she had begged him to find a job for. The one he had placed as engineer to help him build his house because he wanted to help her family. He had stomped away to angry to see and on getting home sat down in brooding silence while his new wife delve into the fish and wine with gusto. He thought of ways to make her pay.

Bobby on the other hand did not have fish to eat nor wine to drink but he could taste a smell that was similar to fish on his tongue, on his fingers and on his skin. He smiled and started his bike and rode away. Osas is one superb lover and she loved him like no man's business. She even got him a job building houses when he knew absolutely nothing about construction. He had made a tidy profit from the job he did last year and now he was preparing to get married. He was not going to marry Osas though. His mother would never agree that he should marry a Benin girl. There's this ijaw girl at the market that looked well brought up. She was pregnant for him already and he has set his eyes on her. He whistled as he drove and when the trailer hit him and lifted him and his bike into the air, he was happy.

The pregnant woman at the market stall got the call just after her neighbour rushed away to see her daughter at the hospital. Her scream hit her basin of garri and scattered the peace that the previous fight had constituted. People gathered around her and listened to her pain as if it was music. They murmured and consoled and the story turned its head and became something  else.

The stories' interconnection can tangle deeper and deeper if you want but I'm sure you see how we are connected sometimes and how arbitrarily the fates weave us into the tapestry of life, as well as how things can change in a few hands of card. What I'm saying is actions affect not just you and your immediate environment, it also may have far reaching implications. Be advised.
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©warpedpoetic, 2019.